AI Again: Part 1: Reintroduction to Artificial Intelligence

Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen and welcome to a new series on AI. We're not going to do a primer on artificial intelligence in this series and we're not going to spend too much time going through specific products in the first episode of this series. You should kind of already know about those, but this episode is still something of a warm-up. That's because we haven't talked about AI that seriously in a while and some things have changed a little bit or a lot of bit. So today we're just going to be getting our bearings, getting our feet under us, and we're going to be taking a more of a deep dive in the next episode. So let's get a little bit caught up.

The chaos of 2023 notwithstanding, ai has taken a really massive leap since we last talked about it. Openai released its Sora model for video and there's been a pretty significant consolidation amongst the rush of startups aiming to provide AI tools for businesses like ours, and we're starting to see big players coming to the top of the crop. And that kind of stability is the signal we in the legal industry want to see, to say it's time for us to really get started implementing AI throughout our whole marketing and sales stack, and, of course, we've been integrating AI into our systems over the last year. Whether you've been making a concerted effort to do it or not, you have actually been integrating AI. A concerted effort to do it or not, you have actually been integrating AI. But if you've actually been working on integrating more AI into your practice, there's a good chance. You've been working on one of the following four areas, and those are research assistance, contract review, client intake processes and document automation. These are the four big areas where AI is really kicking ass for lawyers right now Research assistance and contract review though they're not hugely related to marketing and we're not going to spend much time on them, but they are really important and you should be looking at them.

Tools like Case Text, cocounsel and BlueJ L&E they're really pushing the limits for what's possible, and even the big companies like Lexis they're in this race too. These tools are streamlining research and they're maximizing your capacity, and they're really becoming an integral part of the stack for any lawyer who wants to capitalize on the speed that they offer us. But these tools aren't really anything new. They're just large language models trained on specific sets of data that make them particularly useful to the practice of law. You could even create your own version of these systems relatively simply, even if it would take a pretty significant amount of time to do so, and you can bet that big law firms are doing this to preserve their data. They don't want it to be shared through a chat GPT model. So, while these LLMs are terrific and the capabilities they possess are really incredible, they're not really a new phase for AI or for generative AI. They're just a rewrapped version of chat GPT, for better or for worse.

And while that's all well and good and it does help us, we want to talk about something new and we want to talk about something that can be applied to our marketing stack. So let's talk about intake processes and document automation a little bit more Now, keeping in mind that we're not going to go all the way to the nitty gritty on these that's going to be in the next episode but we do need to start somewhere, and today we're going to just talk a little bit about how everything starts in all of our practices, and that's with intake, because when it comes to intake, we're obviously going to see a lot of tools telling us that they have integrated AI and that it's doing all this cool stuff for us, but what they really usually mean is that they just have like an AI-powered chatbot connected to a bunch of automation, and so if they're actually doing something on the intake side with that chatbot, that's cool, but it's not really anything different. This is all fine, but it's just it's not a new implementation of AI. We're not actually doing something we couldn't do a year ago or two years ago or five years ago. What we really want to see is AI making decisions about what to do with a user once they are in our system, or we want to see AI recommending tasks for things like follow-up that are based on a user's actions and these are just two examples and we're going to see more things like follow-up that are based on a user's actions, and these are just two examples and we're going to see more things like this. But that's the direction we want to go in, but the reality is just, honestly, most of the tools for these kinds of processes are still in development or they're private.

Hubspot, for instance, one of the biggest CRM tools. They've launched a few natively integrated AI tools, but they're still mostly generative content AI tools. But their development of AI-powered guided selling and their prospecting agent are both planning to provide tools that help us do exactly what I just described. They'll proactively make recommendations on deals or on potential clients that are in our CRM, and they'll help automatically enroll potential clients in the appropriate email sequences so that we can increase engagement and nurture clients better. But here's the thing HubSpot has given us really few details on the specifics of these tools. It's hard to say how much of this will be completely automated by their AI agents and how much of this is still going to be powered by a machine learning style set of rules that we need to input into the platform, and that's kind of the norm with things right now. They still require a pretty significant amount of input from us, and the actual integration of AI is still fairly minimal, and it's focused on generative stuff.

Gavelio is another example of this. They offer a really fantastic tool for document automation. It provides both back office and client facing features and offers fantastic opportunities for automation. You can save a ton of time with their tool, but their AI capability is lacking and it's another implementation that's essentially generative. Only what they can do for us with document automation is incredible. It's awesome. I love that tool, but we're still mostly talking about a rules-based system that requires significant input at setup. So over the next couple of weeks, we're going to talk about some ways to really implement AI in your practice, specifically for intake and for document automation, and we're going to talk about how to take advantage of this force multiplier and really get an understanding of where you can take things next with AI, because the reality is, we're not done. There's still more development to come, and this is not the last time we're going to talk about AI. But for today, that's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more Thanks.